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PN 071 Pregnant! Homosexual Men and Surrogacy Online
M. Nebeling Petersen1
1 University of Southern Denmark, Department for the Study of Culture, Odense M, Denmark
By analyzing three blogs, written by gay men who are or have been pregnant through surrogacy, as well two Facebook groups connecting pregnant gay
men and gay fathers through surrogacy, this paper shows how a pregnancy materializes, when you’re pregnant in absentia: How gay men through different
technologies can become pregnant. The analysis shows how different forms of technologies intertwine and create pregnancy in a posthuman understand‑
ing (Hayles, 1999; Braidotti, 2013): New communicative technologies like email and Skype make transnational communication of medical journals, scans,
and personal information flow across borders and enable the intended parents to gain visual and real-time experiences of the pregnancy.These experiences
are shared on social medias like networked blogs and Facebook groups. The production of blogs works as means of extending the lacking (non-pregnant)
body and enables the men to performatively constitute their pregnancy online. Gestational surrogacy assembles multiple reproductive technologies and
radically changes the configuration of male homosexuality from barren sick to fertile. The construction of an intelligible and understandable narrative
of gay male fatherhood is being negotiated and created (among others) in Facebook groups. The intimate and affective connectivity of shared experiences
enables the production of new identities (Ferreday, 2009; Paasonen, Hillis, & Petit, 2015) as gay fathers emerge from the ashes of the degenerate queer.
Lastly the paper argues that transnational commercial surrogacy must be understood as embedded within globalized necro- and biopolitical technologies
(Foucault 2003, Mbembe 2004): In line of the work of Kalindi Vora (2015) I understand transnational commercial surrogacy as affective and biological work
that rests upon “the exhaustion of biological bodies and labors” in the Global South, and works to “extend life in the First World”. Thus the paper concludes
that the assemblage of different technologies enables the bodily pregnancy of gay men: New media and communication technologies like the Skype,
emails, online information and the blog mix with reproductive technologies like gestational surrogacy that enables the gay men to become pregnant. This
enables new bodily experiences of parenthood that are being narrated in the intimate publics of Facebook-groups to produce and formulate new identities
as gay fathers.These different technologies, that are making gay men fertile, are embedded in global colonial power technologies in a biopolitical sense that
make vital energy in the form of reproductive material and reproductive work move globally. Vital energy that extends and improves life in some classed
and racialized geographies at the expense of the productive, reproductive, biological, and affective labor and vital energy in other classed and racialized ge‑
ographies. References: Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Ferreday, Debra (2009). Online Belongings. Fantasy, Affect andWeb Communities. Foucault,
Michel (2003). Society Must Be Defended. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman. Mbembe, Achilles: "Necropolitics" in Public Culture
15(1): 11–40 Paasonen, S., Hillis, K., & Petit, M. (2015). Introduction: Networks of Transmission: Intensity, Sensation, Value. In Networked Affect. Vora,
Kalindi (2015). Life Support. Biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor.
PN 072 Thinking Digital Media Intimacy Through Glitch
J. Sundén1
1 Södertörn University, Södertörn, Sweden
In this paper, I attempt to theorize digital intimacy – of being intimate in or with digital media – by putting into play a vocabulary of malfunctioning,
broken, vulnerable technologies. In particular, I use the term ‘glitch’to account for technological failure and its consequences for digital intimacy. Technol‑
ogies always implicate their own failures, breakdowns, and glitches. This idea resonates with Paul Virilio’s theory of the accident, his belief that technology
cannot exist independent of its potential for accidents (Lotringer and Virilio 2005). As holding such accidental potential, every technological invention is
simultaneously an invention of technological malfunction. It will be argued that it is in the crack, the break, the glitch, that the inner workings of – as well
as our intimate entanglements with – technology reveal themselves. Glitch is the spinning wheel on the computer screen, the delay between a command
given and its execution, the tension and anxiety linked to technological brokenness. Glitch is also that which makes us pay attention to the materiality
of our bodies, as our intimate interlacing with the machine is momentarily interrupted (cf. Russell 2012). Glitch disrupts those forms of intimacy that
build on seamless digital connectivity, and provides perhaps a possibility of envisioning other ways of being intimate with digital media, based in their
very brokenness. Etymologically, glitch possibly derives from the Yiddish word glitsh (slippery place, or a slip). Glitch signals a slipperiness of something or
someone off balance and a loss of control. By considering the importance of technologies out of control for ways of theorizing digital intimacy, the paper
contributes to posthumanist feminist theory. Within current posthumanist theorizing, nature holds a lot of promise. Nature is understood as having agency
in the sense of being lively, unruly, and disobedient in ways that have consequences for how the world can be understood. What appears to be a disappear‑
ing trope within current posthumanist theory is the technological, as if there was nothing unruly or wild at heart of how technologies work (or do not work).
This disappearance also disregards work that takes seriously questions of nonhuman agency and embodiment in technological domains (Braidotti 2013;
Hayles 1999, 2005; Suchman 2007, 2011). This presentation contributes to contemporary posthumanist feminist theory by bringing technology (back) into
the picture. References Braidotti, Rosi (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) My mother was a computer: Digital subjects
and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature,
and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lotringer, Sylvère and Paul Virilio (2005) The accident of art. Translated by Michael Taormina. New
York: Semiotext(e). Russell, Legacy (2012) “Digital dualism and the glitch feminism manifesto,” Cyborgology (10 December),
cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch-feminism-manifesto/. Suchman, Lucy (2011)“Subject objects,”Feminist Theory 12(2): 119–145.
Suchman, Lucy (2007)“Feminist STS and the sciences of the artificial,”In Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch and JudyWajcman (eds).
The handbook of science and technology studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.